I have a friend who has asked me to help her with her MacBook Pro, her Time Capsule, and her Apple TV. Apart from an iPhone, I'm not really an Apple hardware kind of person, so I'm really just stumbling around. Hopefully, some people here can shed some light on the following:

1. I've set up the Time Capsule with Time Machine to back up her MacBook Pro. After a bit of trial and error, and some googling, I got it to work by plugging the TC into her router (Vodafone supplied), configuring the TC to connect via Ethernet, turning off wireless on the MBP, and then connecting the MBP to the TC via Ethernet. It's happily doing it's first back up now. However, in future, she wants to be able to do her back ups wirelessly. Is it as simple as configuring TC via Airport Utility to connect via Wireless, and turning it off Bridge mode, or is there more to it than that?

2. She would also like to extend the wifi signal from the house to her sleepout, and I think the TC can help with this, but I'm not sure how? Can some one provide some instructions, or a link to instructions, on how to setup the TC to act as a wifi extender (i.e. the Vodafone-supplied modem/router is the main wifi base station, the TC will repeat/boost the wifi signal)? She'd also like to connect her printer to the USB port on the TC - would this make the printer available across the network?

3. She has an Apple TV which she wants to use as a wireless display connector for her MBP, using a program called AirParrot. I've never come across this solution myself, but she reckons she needs to update her operating system to be able to run AirParrot. I never had to update OSX before, so I don't know how it compares to Windows. Is the update run from within OSX, and does it affect existing installed programs and/or data, or will everything be left intact?

Configure the Wireless settings on the TC to "extend" a network, and enter the network details for the vodafone WiFi network. The Macbook can then connect to the network, and will back up wirelessly. This will take far less time than the first backup run

The airport series (including the TC) are pretty configurable for most network setups you could want, but you just need to get used to different terminology for the same feature!

As for updating system software, under the Apple menu (top left), choose software update. This will download and apply any incremental updates to the current system version. OS X system versions are numbered 10.x.y, where the "x" is a major release, and the "y" is a incremental bug fix. Each major release also has the name of a cat - so 10.6 is Snow Leopard, 10.7 is Lion, 10.8 is Mountain Lion. If you have 10.6.1 and run software update, it will take you to 10.6.8 (most up to date version of 10.6).

If you want to move to a newer major release, you will need to purchase it from the App Store.

Airparrot seems to need 10.6.8 or higher - what system are you currently running?

EDIT: Oops, missed the bit on wanting to print - yep, just plug it in to the USB port on the TC.